Devotional Hours with the Bible, Volume 1: Chapter 14 - Jacob's Dream at Bethel
By J.R. Miller
Genesis 28
Nothing is more beautiful than an ideal home. Love rules in all its life. The members are as one, in their fellowship and association. Each thinks of the comfort, the convenience, the happiness of the others. In the home of Isaac--all these conditions seem to have been reversed. The veil is lifted and the life of this chosen family is revealed as sadly divided, rent by strifes and jealousies. There is no semblance of love in the home association. There are no home ties binding the household together. The dove of peace does not nestle there. There is no common interest for which all strive. Instead, they are torn apart in bitter personal aims and struggles, plotting against each other in most unseemly way, deceiving one another. The story told in the twenty-seventh chapter is a pitiful one, and when we remember that it was in the family of sacred promise, that all these unseemly things occurred, it perplexes us. We would naturally expect beautiful and godly living--in this family which carried in it the holy seed.
First, we see Isaac planning to give the family blessing to Esau. Yet he knew well that the purpose of God was that Jacob should receive the blessing. Esau had sold his birthright and had also shown himself unfit to be the head of the family. Still his father clung to him and sought to have him receive the blessing of the firstborn.
Rebekah, ever on the alert, having learned of Isaac's arrangement to bestow the blessing on Esau, set about to defeat it. She would stop at nothing and accordingly devised a scheme to deceive her blind old husband. Jacob played his part well, under his mother's instructions, and won the blessing by fraud and falsehood. The result was the intensifying of Esau's hatred for Jacob, and a vow that he would kill him. So Jacob had to flee for his life. For many years he did not see his home again or the faces of his father and mother. His life, too, was full of trouble. He had sought to live by fraud--and fraud followed him into his old age!
The unveiling of the life of this home with its enmities, its strifes, its frauds, and deceptions--should teach us again, how unfit and unbeautiful is such a life in any home. Everything of happiness was wrecked. We cannot imagine anything gentle or kindly in the life Isaac and Rebekah lived together in their old age. After their striving and plotting so long--the one against the other--it is impossible to think of their coming together again in the confidence and mutual affection which ought to be realized in every marriage.
Then there grew a bitter feud between the brothers which was never really healed. All the hopes of marriage and home were negatived in this marriage and home. Out of this wreck and mockery of family life--comes an appeal for a home life which shall realize all the possibilities of love.
There are many homes in Christian lands, homes of wealth and of rank, in which the household life is no better than was that of this old patriarchal family. It is a shame, that this confession has to be made. Let us determine to make our homes places of peace, of unity, of purest unselfishness, a place where all the best and sweetest things of love shall be realized.
We take up now, the account of Jacob's flight from Beer-sheba. He was running away from home. It was his own fault, too--his and his mother's--that he had to flee. He had got a valuable thing--his blind father's blessing, which included the birthright with all its privileges. But he had sinned to get it--and sin always brings trouble. He had won by fraud and lying--what God would have given to him in His own time and way, without any stain or blot--if Jacob and his mother had only kept their hands off, and refrained from all plotting and scheming.
